Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

I am bummed.

Yesterday, friends sent me the news that somebody in Japan has built a road that plays music as a car rolls upon it. There's a video available.

I was talking about this in the Eighties. I've been scooped.

I'm going to go off and sulk.

While I'm doing that, you can read an essay I wrote, originally for a book
George Ewing was proposing. When that fell through, I tried peddling it to a magazine, without success.

For George, I entitled it "The Roads Must Rock 'n' Roll," an allusion to the title of a Heinlein story. Later, I called it "Song of the Highway." I can't remember exactly when I wrote this, but the file I pulled it from indicates that it was earler than July, 1988.

When I was a kid I loved to ride over bridges. When Dads would drive our Studebaker wagon over a bridge's metal latticework roadway, a mysterious and wonderful hum would fill the car. Perhaps the bridge was singing to us.

After getting my own car and moving to Chicago, I discovered that the roadway spoke to me every time I approached a tollbooth. The builders had embedded a series of bumps, maybe an inch apart, in the road, which generated a burst of deep sound. Each zone of bumps was a few feet long, and there were three zones. So sounds of "Brrp... brrp... brrp" came to mean, "You'd better have your forty cents ready!"

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